As you sit in your booth, you call people to show their papers. You check whether the names, serial numbers, dates and data match. If all is good, [...]]]>

Dealing with immigration: the best way to understand the word "bureaucracy"

Papers, Please puts you in the hotseat of an immigration officer in a fictional country of Arstotzka where you get to decide who gets in, and who doesn’t.

As you sit in your booth, you call people to show their papers. You check whether the names, serial numbers, dates and data match. If all is good, you can approve this person. If it isn’t, you deny or detain him or her, depending on the severity of the issue.

Detecting a discrepancy of wrong issuing city by cross-referencing your official handbook and a person's passport

There is a backstory to the game. It goes like this: a border has just open and you have been given the job as the one and only immigration officer in this border. For thirty days, you will go to work and every person you correctly approve or deny will reward you with money, along with bribes, bonuses and other one-time events.

You have a family to take care of, which will cost you money to upkeep due to rent, heat and food. Your efficacy at work will determine if they flourish or perish.

The game gets increasingly complicated. You start of dealing with two or three documents, but because of different world events such as terrorism, deteoriating relations between nations, and disease, you will increasingly need to deal with more paperwork, weapons and dilemmas.

A dilemma you will encounter: do you help your government or assist a clandestine anti-government group? Do you take bribes? Each choice you make will lead to a different ending, of which there are 20.

A miserable ending awaits if you make the wrong choices

The game runs very well on a netbook and you can probably play it with a trackpad should you wish. It is certainly advantageous to play with a mouse since speed is of the essence in this game.

The only issue is that you must play fullscreen, because windowed mode is way too big for a netbook’s display of 1024×600. Fullscreen resizes it down, but oddly, it will scale it down such that Papers, Please will only take up half the screen, leaving a substantial perimeter of black bars on all four sides as evident on the first two screenshots.

Papers, Please offers some of the best value for money and an addicting factor that is up there with highly rated regular games. You can play it through once to get the story, or you can play it again and again to experience the different endings. It’s fantastic.

Like

A unique game with a good replay value

Great storyline, thrilling endings

Fun because of the constantly changing environment

Dislike

Suboptimal fullscreen scaling

Verdict

Great fun, great value, good replay value.

Gameplay: Great!

Graphics smoothness: Excellent

Work needed to get game to play: None

Do note that you will have to sign up and these three games are extremely popular. This might result in GOG’s website going down, or disallowing you to login because they are being overwhelmed.

Battlefield 1942 is a first-person shooter first released [...]]]>

Planes are in high demand, as proven by the number of campers in the airfield. They range from heavy bombers (B17), light bombers (Ilyushin, AichiVal, SBD-5), and fighters (Zero, Yak9, BF109).

As of writing, Battlefield 1942 is still available for free on Origin – you just have to download it via this link because it is more difficult to find it on the Origin program. Get it before 1 March 2013.

Bring the boom boom pow to your enemies.

Battlefield 1942 is a first-person shooter first released in 2002. When it came out, it represented  a breakthrough in this genre. You know a game is successful when you keep getting the same thing again and again for years – see the Battlefield series, The Sims and Call of Duty.

It added a variety of ways you can have a rampage over your enemies including blowing them up with a plane’s cannons, blow them up with explosives, or just run them over with your jeep. Have a battle on sea, land and air. Work in teams to coordinate artillery fire, or work alone and climb up a mountain to snipe your enemies.

Each class and each spawn point gives you different abilities and vehicles to choose rom

The game is primarily a multiplayer game, and single player merely means playing the game on the same maps but with really dumb bots. On this note, the game is still highly playable because there are still many servers and players online.

The game runs quite poorly, unfortunately, on a netbook with internal graphics. Playing the game at 640x480x16 with everything set at low, and a disadvantaging visiblity of 50 to 75 per cent, you get a framerate of about 5-20 depending on how many people there are and how many objects there are on a map.

On the other hand, if you have a separate graphics processor, such as an ION 2 like the netbook  that I have, you can play this game without much slowdowns. Running on the ION 2, you can play at Medium settings with a 100% visibility and get a framerate of 15-40, again the same slowdowns will apply, especially when there is a lot of action.

The game runs at a 4:3 resolution, so if you do not want to play with a stretched image, follow this link.

Overall, I’d get the game whether or not you have a discrete graphics processor. It is one of the most entertaining game to have on your computer when you are bored – in class with the university’s WiFi or when you are travelling and can’t bring your main computer.

Tanks: from heavy tanks like the TIger to tank destroyers such as the M10, and everything in between.

Like

The pioneer BF1942: still with all its lustre and nostalgia.

A great variety of weapons and vehicles

Dislike

Runs poorly on integrated graphics

If you’re used to the newer Battlefields, the features in this game might feel limited. I see it as simplicity.

Verdict

It’s free – until 1st March 2013 – you have nothing to lose, so get it. If you have an AMD C-series processor or a Nvidia graphics card in your netbook, you will have a good time. It is playable on integrated graphics, but you won’t get a good score due to a choppy framerate.

An excellent game, simple and varied.

Gameplay: GG

Graphics: Great… unless you have integrated graphics

Work needed to get game to play: Plays right out of the box.

Get it now while it lasts!

Every now and then, indie game makers bring something new to us gamers sick and tired of the commercial industry’s logic of safety. Everything seems to be become a first-person shooter – even classics like Syndicate, Fallout and Jagged Alliance have gone that way, despite their successes as isometric games. This time, stick it [...]]]>

Every now and then, indie game makers bring something new to us gamers sick and tired of the commercial industry’s logic of safety. Everything seems to be become a first-person shooter – even classics like Syndicate, Fallout and Jagged Alliance have gone that way, despite their successes as isometric games. This time, stick it to StabYourself to come out with a game that is a mish-mash between Portal and Mario. This platformer is a unique game, and by default, it comes with both Super Mario Bros levels as well as Portal levels, so you can play a Mario-with-a-Portal-gun game or Portal-with-Mario. There’s also the ability to create your own levels if you’re willing, and despite the really retro interface, this game does have the means to connect to a server where you can find all the DLCs, as well as connect to other players so you can play Portal with others.

Now, a 2D version of Portal isn’t a new thing. A while ago, I reviewed a Flash version of Portal, which is basically similar to this, except it was higher res and less cute. This, however, is a lower-res, cute-to-the-max, 8-bit screecher that is meant to tingle your senses with nostalgia, and the platformer does have some dynamism – as mentioned, you can play this as a full-blown Mario game who has a portal gun, or you can play it in a more serious Portal-only fashion.

Beginners beware: the lack of a save game function will force you to see this at the most unfortunate of times!

The game does have a few issues. Chief of which is aiming your Portal. The biggest issue lies in the fact that this game is windowed, so if you accidentally over-scroll, you will find yourself clicking on the desktop, which minimizes the game and makes you search for it. This is especially common when you’re trying to shoot portals. The programmers would do well making a scroll-limit, so you can actually shoot your portals without accidentally clicking outside of the game.

For a game that is less than 10mb, Mari0 has much to offer. It is absolutely compatible with Windows 7 and XP, and doesn’t require much of your computer for it to run smoothly. It’s a great time-waster, and you’ll thoroughly enjoy the time you spent on this game. Of course, a pet peeve would be having to restart the game all over again just because you lost your last life. That is truly ouch. I wasn’t too good with Mario, and didn’t know that turtle shells are skeeting battering rams – that took a few lives from me. Also,

Portal-with-Mario, instead of vice versa. A second mode of play.

I didn’t know that red lasers meant death and that blue lasers functioned the same way as platforms. Sounds absolutely noobed out, but that can happen Which leads me to highlight the next issue: the fact that you have only three lives to work with, which can make things tough on beginners who aren’t familiar with Portal or Mario. You’ll find that without a save game function, you’ll be losing lives really quickly as you find out how to tackle monsters/lasers/traps.

You can download the latest version here, for Linux, OSX and Windows.

Well, they did, and Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun is the last one which can be obtained free and absolutely legally. This game builds upon the original C&C and brings it to a new level of sophistication and [...]]]>

The final, free C&C game is one of the most memorable.

Who knew a company like EA would release so many classics to the public for absolutely free?

Well, they did, and Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun is the last one which can be obtained free and absolutely legally. This game builds upon the original C&C and brings it to a new level of sophistication and depth. The game is highly exciting, and definitely something you want to try, especially since it’s absolutely free and pretty simple to install.

Just like the original C&C, the game is very similar – build a base, gather Tiberian, amass an army and then attempt to massacre your enemies. The game brings familiarity to people who have played the good ol’ games, whether it be Red Alert or the original C&C, both of which are free too, by the way.

The essential difference between this game and the original C&C is that it’s been complicated to good taste – you get more units, more buildings, and more ways to slaughter your enemies. For example, in the original C&C, you had the option of one superweapon. Now you have about three. Remember Tanya from Red Alert? In C&C: Tiberian Sun, you have Tanya-esque units, such as the Cyborg.

Tiberium Sun is a great game, especially so because it’s free and it’s quite engaging. One thing that I find a bit unfortunate has to be the lack of multiplayer capability. Out of the box, you are unable to play with your friends.

Now, my two cents. Since all three games are offered free, you do have a lot on your hands if you try to play all three at once. You’d miss work, lose your family and lose half your weight because you can’t get to the kitchen to cook. If you don’t want this to happen, however, I’d say that while Tiberian Sun is a great game, the original C&C is still a lot more engrossing than TS is.

My theory of why this is so lies in the fact that the original C&C is a much tougher game, where as Tiberian Sun is a game that follows a late-90′s-and-early-2000′s trend whereby games are gradually made easier and easier. In fact, the inclusion of a Skirmish mode just removes a large chunk of your impetus to play the Campaign – the slow, mission-by-mission release of stronger units, which keeps you addicted to playing the game just to see what cool toy you’ll have next.

Is it a bad game? No. It’s absolutely terrific. That’s why, if you’re bored, you should head over here and download it. Installation is pretty easy, you just have to copy the whole SUN folder onto somewhere in your hard drive and run SUN.exe. That will enable you access to both the original Tiberian Sun and Firestorm. It’s pretty much the easiest game to run among the three free games. In case you encounter an error stating that you are unable to open up the file, what you need is WinRAR, which you can download from here. Presumably, if you are running this on a netbook, you’d want to download the 32-bit version, that goes by the name WinRAR x86 (32-bit) x.xx.

Like

A great revamp of the C&C series with a lot of new units and new strategies.

Dislike

Graphics still looks like Gameboy Color

Not as engrossing as the first two C&Cs – IMHO, YMMV.

Verdict

Quite a sweet game for Skirmish, though campaign-wise, definitely try the first C&C.

Gameplay:  Great!

Graphics: Looks antiquated.

Work needed to get game to play: Minimal – extract a folder from the RAR and run the executable.

This review is based on the Good Old Games version of Empire Earth with its expansion.

Before the game went downhill, Empire Earth was one of the most interesting games out there that continued, and extrapolated, the classic Age of [...]]]>

This review is based on the Good Old Games version of Empire Earth with its expansion.

Before the game went downhill, Empire Earth was one of the most interesting games out there that continued, and extrapolated, the classic Age of Empires tradition of having different epochs with different units, warfare styles and tactics. The first Empire Earth was similar, but it was so much more fun as you can fight your enemies with not only swords, trebuchets and galleys, but also with bombers, rifles and tanks. The game takes you along for a real exciting ride which will last you hours. Although the fundamental concept of the game is simple – fight a war, kill them all – the ever changing dynamics of epochs makes the game challenging.

I have often compared this game to Rise of Nations. It is similar, however, it does have a few differences that distinguish it from RoN. Rise of Nations feels more realistic, and in my opinion, is a better game, however Empire Earth does have certain details that make things more intriguing such as using the supernatural to smite your enemy, being able to go past the present and use futuristic units. Then, there’s always the option to use priests to cause all sorts of calamities such a earthquakes or create a volcano out of no where to throw flaming balls of lava, all in the name of destroying your enemy.

Empire Earth, however, does have a few quirks. Despite being an old game, it seemed to need quite some power to play it. Playing it with a Intel GMA3150, I had to set the graphics down to the lowest, and even so, it experienced slowdowns quite often. Initially, when the map is not as cluttered, the game runs smoothly at 30fps, however, with additional units and buildings, the game experiences quite a bit of slowdowns. Sometimes, you’ll be chugging along at 15fps.

Empire Earth is not an easy game if you haven't had much practice.

Empire Earth is also not a very beginner friendly game – you can’t just jump in and get on with it. You’ll have to do some pre-reading up on the units and their functions, as well as how to go about playing the game efficiently. The tutorials do help, though.

Overall, the game is actually pretty playable, and it brings with it a very interesting concept. It is quite recommendable especially if you have friends that like this genre of games, because playing with your friends always makes the game a lot better. Unfortunately, I have not been able to connect to a multiplayer lobby, so LAN or a pre-arranged internet game is your only option.

Like

Hours and hours of gameplay

The variety of units in this game is extremely unique

Dislike

Lags at times

Quite a confusing game at first

Verdict

Good game, although you might want to try Rise of Nations first.

Gameplay:  Good.

Graphics: Dated, but the game does not rely on eye candy to make it fun.

Work needed to get game to play: Little. You’ll need to turn the graphics down, though.